Posts Tagged ‘writer’

the memo

Posted: June 29, 2013 in Uncategorized
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So how do you know when your “home office” has become your cave? How do you know when your ability to be comfortable when alone crosses over into drooling shut-in status, minus the drool? (Or plus the drool for that matter. It just tends to be that CSI giveaway that’s hard to ignore.) How long have family and friends avoided asking what you’ve been up to because they just don’t know how to make sense of what you do with your days? And if you happen to offer up that you’ve been working, how long has that puzzled expression crossed their brow, the one that says doesn’t work pay?

How long has everyone around you been wondering if what you really are is a hobbyist who’s run out of track for her miniature choo-choo?

So how do you know you’ve become a hermit writer?

I mean, it’s not like you grow up whispering such intentions to your best friends, right after everyone confides which one of the Bee Gees they’d do. It’s not like there was a career day that changed your life. Do they ever? For anyone? It’s not like that frumpy sweater was always so comfortable. Perhaps it wasn’t even always frumpy.

Rather, becoming a hermit writer is a subtle evolution. One day you’ve got a normal job like everyone else. The next day you’re fired. (Was that the first hint at your inability to blend?) The next day you’re writing something wretched but determined to stick with it. The next day you’re avoiding the phone. By the next day—and by day, I’m clearly speaking of biblically proportioned epochs in personal history—unless you’re either starving or receiving knocks on your door from social service agents called by concerned neighbors who couldn’t handle the smell any longer, you have no flipping idea how Howard Hughes you’ve gone on your own ass.

Until.

An event large or small forces you out of your hole, and you realize that there was a little item you missed while away, something you didn’t get.

The memo.

What memo, you ask? Exactly.

It’s the memo that would have told you that time had turned its butt to you and gone the other direction, that the smallest atomic matter of your life had changed, that whole children had become adults, that some things had become easier and you were doing it the hard way, that some things had become harder and you were in denial, that one space between sentences had usurped two, that they weren’t called memos anymore.

I suppose the typical reaction to such rude removal from the cave is to return posthaste. But all is not lost. Emerging and returning is the stuff of the tale of life itself. Is it not? So there you go, more fodder for the page.

building character from well-defined borders

Posted: June 29, 2013 in Uncategorized
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From matrimony to hook ups, from casual acquaintances to friendships with true bonds, there is a melding intention that exists, like anything, on a continuum. And, if the outcome is any indication, it can be argued that the compulsion to join together with another is ultimately an attempt to define oneself as an individual or, in double entendre, writing terms, to build character.

Much of Freudian psychology is the tale of ego mapping, the topography of established physical borders between child and parent that, once recognized and acted upon, begins one’s journey. Alone. Having been set on this solitary course, much of our ensuing lifetime energy is then directed toward recapturing that sense of connectedness and oneness we once knew with our parents.

Well, what if the very effort to merge with another instead served to encapsulate us further as individuals? And what if that result made for good fiction?

The rippling irony is that the endeavor to become one with the other reconfirms our edges—however, and here’s where we score a break, only as they brush across the other. So, regardless of how deeply one wishes to take the bond, the melding intention works to establish the individual but, fascinatingly, not necessarily standing alone. Rather, vis-à-vis the other.

To see how this plays out in fiction, one need look no further than the “shorthand” sketch of the evolution of a character’s internal development that Portland writer, Cynthia Whitcomb, has constructed. In it she outlines the idea that, as characters expand their focus from themselves ever outward, the characters themselves expand and become more interesting. In her shorthand, there are five basic levels of a character’s focus, ranging from his or her thinking only about matters of self to then caring for another, usually a romantic partner, to ever increasing spheres of attention and concern such as family and community to, finally, all of humanity. The fun, she says, is taking the reader or movie viewer along for the ride of these shifts. Moving characters up these levels of focus provides some of the engrossing, pleasurable arcs that keep us reading or watching.

So, to state it another way, there is an ironic, inverse relationship that renders a character more interesting as an individual in direct proportion to his or her decreased focus on self. We empirically know this to be true. And, returning to Freud, we can easily see that the shift of a character’s focus from him or herself to an expanding other would be meaningless if there were no weaning process, no ego shaping, no separation to begin with. The attempt then to remedy the situation by trying to join once again with the other—or, in story terms, a character’s having ever more meaningful contact with others—renders one an ever more sharply defined individual.

Good to know for all of us: the real ones as well as the ones in our head.

(And if you read a certain earlier blog about Schrödinger’s box, it also stands to reason using the logic of that piece that the more people one has included in one’s sphere of influence, the more witnesses one acquires. The more eyes on a person, the more he or she at least appears to be larger-than-life and interesting as an individual, hence celebrity.)

tragedy is a matter of timing

Posted: June 29, 2013 in Uncategorized
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We’ve all been right there, right? A fresh seat awaits us on the first day of English class. A syllabus is flung on the desk before us, and we see that, Oh Nellie, the majority of the pending semester will be devoted to the particular delight that is the study of tragedy. Over the coming weeks, we’re given the definitions and groundwork. The terms are defined because, after all, not all brands of human suffering fall under the category of “Tragedy.” We read the heavy hitters: Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Woody Allen. And we pick up the tools of the trade: hamartia, peripeteia, irony. But for all the highfalutin talk about character flaws versus character errors or the nature of moral irresponsibility versus plain ol’ ignorant mistakes, there is a commonsense backdrop to this drama that is left completely offstage—time.

Timing is the singing cowboy hero of all genres, all narrative. Like the cowboy crooner, a tale’s timing might seem to fade into the background or rear its ugly head, but in either case it’s the rhythm of the piece. Any writer knows, without proper timing, stories are nothing more than independent sets of abstract coordinates. Setting, motivation, character, all would exist in a conceptual though meaningless falling-tree-in-the-forest-with-no-one-there-to-hear-it kind of way, each component pointlessly autonomous. It is not until a feat of timing intersects with these elements that the pieces fit. We can see that, even in a post-Tarantino Hollywood where time is a malleable toy, timing remains the star, the agent of quickening. As writers, as readers, we all know this to be true, at least on some intuitive level. But in the case of tragedy, the issue of timing goes further than the sound construction of story.

Timing defines tragedy.

The tale of human suffering is typically dependent on loss. Similarly, the notion of loss is dependent on a precursor of possession. In other words, one must have something in order to lose it. Of course, the more precious and esteemed the possession, the greater the loss once it’s gone and the more tragic the tale. But the fall from greatness/the great loss that is tragedy has a further baseline contingency that mandates that its very nature changes in relation to ones age.

Death when one is old may be sad, but there is not enough life left to lose to make the scenario a tragedy. But when one is young, death represents incomprehensible loss. And, since youth comes before the social mergers and acquisitions that can compose a span of life, it is typically the only possession that a young character can lose.

So death is tragic when one is young. Mistakes are tragic when one is old enough to know better. In the latter case, one is robbed of the glory of their youthful past and at the same time denied the dignity of a positive remembrance upon death. Conversely, a youthful mistake may be passed off as whimsy or ignorance. But if an error made while young robs one of his or her potential, then the future once faced is gone. This is a type of death, of course, and thus a tragedy. But not much beats the heartache of tragedy to be found in the mistakes made in later life as they deny the future as well as the past.

Although the term has been horribly misapplied, similar to the mauling of the concept of irony in a certain misguided pop song from a few years back, tragedy is a different animal than sadness or even disaster. Tragedy interacts with time uniquely. Whereas romance is possible for the young as well as the old, and fools, heroes, and villains of any age can play their roles in comedy to mystery to adventure—tragedy is rigid.

The writer weaves the elements of story. The thread is time. Duh. But tragedy must remain age appropriate. And the writer who doesn’t respect this distinction is headed for tragedy. Oh, the irony. Well, not so much on either front.